Elon Musk goes to Chicago - does he meet a need?

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and inventor Elon Musk don't only share memorable first names and national notoriety, they also both preside over troubled organizations: The Mayor over America's third largest city which is reeling from divisions by race, rising crime and a shrinking population, the inventor over  a highly valued company which has not made a profit yet and which is struggling to produce its most successful car model amidst rumors of sabotage.

Banter among leaders in a failed subway station in Chicago (Tribune photo)

Maybe the two had to find each other. This week the duo stood side by side in Chicago's underworld, specifically in the mothballed $400 million super-station to nowhere, a silent witness to a transportation dream having gone wrong.

Musk and Emmanuel both were clad in tieless white shirts with the top buttons open to praise their deal. The Mayor taps the entrepreneur to build a high speed transit tunnel from downtown to O'Hare airport, a deal that costs the tax payer nothing, does the trip in under 20 minutes (apparently the city actually issued some kind of RFP, Musk estimates the actual time to be 12 minutes). Currently CTA's Blue Line needs 43 minutes for the same trip. All this and somehow also a use of the mothballed underground station for a fare not higher than an Uber ride, i.e. between $20-25. (The CTA charges $2.50) and an estimated construction cost of $1 billion. Musk thanked the Mayor "for betting on the Boring Company". The Mayor, in turn calls his gamble the fast lane to the future.

"This is the fast lane to Chicago's future" (Mayor Emmanuel)

the weak link at every subway station,the elevator. Every 30 seconds a van

At the heart of the deal is a version of Musk's tunnel projects which initially made headlines as devices for a "hyperloop" but have since been down-scaled to regular tunnels with sleds running through them, no more talk about vacuums and speeds near the speed of sound. In California and Maryland some actual boring has allegedly already occurred. The tunnel technology in which relatively small boring machines cut through the underground much faster than the ever larger standard machines developed for train and road-tunnels is where Musk has placed his chips. His machines are supposed to work with high pressure, are battery powered and use the spoils to enforce the tunnel walls, all pretty interesting and promising innovations which could give the small group of staid German and Japanese companies controlling the current market a run for their money.

The Mayor in his announcements creates an arc to history:

"If you look at the history of Chicago … every time we’ve been an innovator in transportation, we have seized the future. I think figuring out — when time is money — how to shrink the distance between the economic and job engines of O’Hare and downtown positions Chicago as the global leader and global city in the United States.” Emanuel in an interview with the Chicago Tribune 

Musk thinks that "It's very unlikely to be more than three years" before people will be  using the system, the Chicago Tribune reported, a record in speed which would be far more impressive than the speed with which palettes are supposed to zip 16 person automated vans through the Boring tube. The prediction is even more incredible given that none of the proposed technology has really been applied, especially not the "elevators" which are supposed to get the 16 person vehicles on these sleds fast enough to achieve the promised capacity of 2,000 people per hour in each direction. (Around every 30 seconds) and that the project hasn't seen alignment studies, public participation or environmental impact studies, in short, the arsenal of regulations which make infrastructure construction in a democracy so incredibly slow. Even though Chicago is home to machine politics, it isn't clear how Emanuel wants to circumnavigate all those potentially lethal hurdles.

Tesla on a sled in test tunnel (Company photo: Boring)

It is easy to critique the entire undertaking for its technological optimism, its political naivety, its economic vagueness, its belief that regulations could be avoided or from its usefulness as serious transportation. New technologies have always been subjected to ridicule and Musk has some credibility as Emmanuel didn't hesitate to point out:

“We’re taking a bet on a guy who doesn’t like to fail — and his resources. There are a bunch of Teslas on the road. He put SpaceX together. He’s proven something” (Rahm Emmanuel, Chicago Tribune)

 The Atlantic's CityLab wasn't shy to sum it up with abundant clarity in an article titled: "Why Elon Musk's Chicago 'Express Loop is Nuts". The author mostly uses the $1 billion cost estimate as the reason for the harsh assessment.

The most damning thing, though, may well be that this hyped-up technology is used to rescue failed transportation policies. Musk's tunnel technology may be good for something, but least of all does it work as a silver bullet for metropolitan transportation woes, no matter that politicians of all colors grab the nearest microphone to make fantastic pronouncements each time another fancy technology appears on the horizon.

Plastic bucket and dirt: Musk in the muck of actual boring (Musk Instagram)

Generations of politicians in different countries have done exactly that for decades, using the promise of magnetic levitation trains ("MagLev") as their dream machine.  None ever saw a train in revenue service until one single short-line airport shuttle finally opened in Shanghai, limping along as a money loser and doing nothing useful at all. More is finally to come in Japan which had bought the technology from Germany and developed it further. Maryland's Governor Hogan, a staunch road-builder who defunded most transit projects in his Maryland nevertheless was in awe onboard of a MagLev test train when the Japanese consortium promised some money. The Republican governor also allowed Musk to dig in Maryland soil for a promised high speed sled tunnel between DC and Baltimore, the same corridor also eyed for the magnetic trains.

When it comes to these fantasy projects, politicians, business people and some consultants suspend not only all disbelief, but they also suspend a careful analysis of "purpose and need", the usual first step for federally funded projects.

Why, one would ask, is there really a need in Chicago where the existing CTA Blue Line already serves the airport and is hardly used to capacity? (March 2018 average weekday boardings at O'Hare: a mere 10,216). What is the purpose? The same question applies for the connection between DC and Baltimore for which the Japanese MagLev team and Musk compete. The two cities are connected by commuter rail (45 minutes) plus Amtrak's high speed service via Acela, intercity rail service that is not exactly on par with HSR abroad but domestically the envy of any other major metro area.

Traditional boring head painted, used for LA's Purple Line 

Of course, one could argue that an experimental innovation technology needs a proof of concept project and as such it doesn't matter much where this takes place. Fair enough. But what if the proof of concept proves that the service is so fast that it can't stop often enough to pick up riders (a problem for both, MagLev and Hyperloop), that it is so expensive to operate that fares would have to be astronomical (as in Maglev) or, that the systems capacity is so limited that it can't really make a dent in traffic (Hyperloop). It is already obvious for either of those two futuristic systems that they are incompatible with everything else in a metropolitan transportation network and will therefore be extremely difficult to scale up? The latter is true for Musk's sleds, even though they are designed to carry vehicles he makes at Tesla and which can also go on roads. A LA freeway easily carries 250,000 vehicles a day. The number of tunnels, sleds and elevators needed to send those underneath the sprawling city would be mind-boggling, even at the cost that Musk envisions.

fast van on on Tesla chassis: Tunnel mini-bus 

It his hard to shed the suspicion that the fancy newfangled stuff mostly serves the purpose of distracting from the real difficulties and failures. Be it Chicago's transportation or Musk's production hick-ups.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

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